I was heading across the street to Amante to meet Meg for lunch yesterday when the Immersive Media Beetle drove by. I assume it was taking photos for Google Street View. Now I just have to keep checking the view that shows Lijit World HQ for me wearing my Urban Assault Race t-shirt. Fortunately I wasn’t picking my nose…
Aaron works with our buddy Pete at Rapid Creek Cycles in Palisade, and also happens to go big. Well, bigger than everybody in our group (except Tom):
The bead came off the rim, the tube swelled out the side and wrapped around the axle, but I didn’t get the cameraphone out before it exploded…
Those scamps over at woot included an awesome graphic to enhance the appeal of one of the woot-off items today:
For whatever reason, iTunes sometimes just screws up the the USB device I plug my iPod into. It’s toast, and no device will work; not the iPod, not a flash drive, nothing. No amount of being careful with iTunes and “ejecting” the iPod will help.
Rebooting the computer fixes it, but this happens with such regularity I’d be rebooting several times a day.
But I discovered that if you disable the USB port/device, and then enable it again, the problem is also fixed. Going through the device management dialogs is incredibly cumbersome, so I wrote a script.
fixusb.bat:
@echo off
echo "disabling usb device..."
devcon disable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
echo "enabling usb device..."
devcon enable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
pause
The @USB\VID_... bit is the USB device ID. To get the device ID, you’ll have to go to the Device Manager dialog. Figure out which device the iPod is attached to (I don’t remember exactly how I did this; sorry). Then on the “Details” tab of the device “Properties” dialog you can get the “Device Instance Id”.
I have to use this all the time, so put a shortcut to it on the desktop.
iTunes album art is a disaster. In fact, I keep thinking I’ll write about how bad iTunes sucks in general, but for now, let’s stick with album art. Long story short, the best thing you can do to make album art work on an iPod, is to embed it directly in the MP3 tag.
Well, I’m pushing 10,000 tracks, and I have them backed up, over a network, using an application that diffs them by hashing the content. Essentially this means that if I change the tag, I will have to back all the files over again, but the application will first generate new hash values for all of the files. It’ll take hours and hours.
Furthermore, this will expand the size of every file by the size of the album art. Not so bad if it’s a 15K jpg, but if it’s a high quality image, it could add up to GB.
But I finally succumbed. Still, though iTunes gives a way to embed album art, it’s not automated, and doing this manually for the hundreds of individual albums I have, well, that’s not pretty either.
Googling around I stumbled on this post on Brent Evans Geek Tonic that runs through how to automate with the application Mp3tag.
While these are clear instructions, I’m not much of a keyboard shortcut guy with applications I rarely use. Mp3tag’s menus are pretty convoluted; it took forever to find the way to get it to give you the tagging option in a menu.
Geez. After all that, maybe the undocumented keyboard shortcut is the way to go…
Way back when; seems like the dawn of time now; I was told by a famous and skilled surgeon that it would be 6 months after the surgery before I could start to work on getting back to my previous fitness level. He was about right. 6 months, and my first bike trip out to Moab with the team. I took my place at the back of the peloton.
A couple bad crashes, and cleaned a couple things I’ve never managed before. I’ve had better trips, but I’ve also had worse. My knee held up pretty well; I joined the body armor crew, though just knee pads. I was mighty grateful at least once.
We checked out the shiny new Free Lunch trail in GJ on the way out. I didn’t hit the big stuff, but had a little fun anyway:
I was putting together the panorama photos from our recent trip to Utah and Arizona, and for some reason, Autostitch couldn’t work out what to do with them. But it freaked out in a strange and interesting way:
I also though it would be interesting to try to intentionally include people in the panoramas. Unless the person remains very still, the result is also strange and interesting:
One of the best things I got from my brother when he moved out of his huge house into a small apartment was his compressor. It’s amazing how useful air is.
So most bike tires these days have presta valves, which are not nearly so easy to deal with as schraeder valves like those on cars. There are adapters that sort of convert presta to schraeder, but they’re kind of a cumbersome, and I wanted something more convenient. Surfing around, I found a tool that does it commercially available for $50.
But since I already have a blower tool, and I’m terminally cheap, I decided to try build one for less.
Voila:
And just screwing around a little, I turned it into an Instructable.
I won’t lie; I’m gonna miss you and the good times we had. Like parking directly in front of Target on Christmas Eve.
And I’ll never forget the Saturday night we freaked out Kate and Joseph by driving past open spaces downtown. Ah, the look in their eyes when we picked up the best spot in the garage.
Sniff…
